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Using Laptop To Take Notes Lowers Grades
Meshach writes "A study in the journal Computers & Education found that students who took notes on a laptop got lower marks then student who took notes the traditional way with pen and paper. The study's author hypothesized that using a laptop leads to multitasking (i.e. surfing the net or checking email), which reduces concentration."
Back when I was in an undergrad psychology course, the general consensus was that the method used triggered different parts of the brain. There is something fundamentally different from moving your finger to a particular location and pressing a key than actually moving your hand around to create a string of letters and then focusing on what you have just created.
I was schooled in the late 1970's/early 1980's - way before the advent of computers in the classroom. We were taught that writing things down (even copying from a book) helped the content to 'sink in' to your memory far better than just reading it and I believe this to be true - even now when I take my own notes I remember the content pretty well.
I was taught the same thing but didn't really believe it for most of my time in school. That is, until I got to college and had this professor for diff eq. that had the oddest teaching method ever:
At the start of the class he would start writing on the blackboard, not saying a word. He just copied his (very organized) notes to the board. Very dense writing, a lot of content. When that board was filled, he would continue on and do the same thing on a second blackboard that was located on a side-wall of the classroom. About half the class time was spent that way. Then when the boards were filled, and we were finished copying everything, he would go back to the beginning and start talking about what he had written.
It sounds like a colossal waste of class time, but not only did we cover everything the classes in other sessions covered, I never had to study for an exam in that class. While we're copying things down we're reading it and we're paying attention to what we're reading because we need to replicate it. Then when he was actually there explaining things, we already had an idea of what he was going to talk about, we had already thought about it and understood a few things and not others. We weren't distracted by trying to take notes and were actually listening to what he was saying. In fact, when he said something that cleared something up in our minds that wasn't clear from the notes, I'd just jot something quickly in the margin. Which is funny because although that notebook contains the most detailed notes I've ever taken for any class, I've never had to go back to re-read it. Everything just stuck for the exam.
Lowest amount of work and greatest amount of retention I've ever had for any subject in a classroom. It's been about a decade, and I still remember a good deal about slope fields, bifurcations, characteristic equations, and laplace transforms, among other topics. I think the prof also got a kick out of not explaining to anyone that this was his teaching method the first day of class. We were all sitting there and saw this guy just start writing a ton of stuff up on the board. He waited until he got the boards filled up before introducing himself.
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